Childhood bullying may lead to long-lasting health consequences, impacting psychosocial risk factors for cardiovascular health well into adulthood, according to a new study.

Published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study tracked a group of more than 300 American men from first grade through their early 30s. The study’s findings show that being a victim of bullying and being a bully were both linked to negative outcomes in adulthood.

Led by psychology researcher Karen A. Matthews of the University of Pittsburgh, the study found that men who were bullies during childhood were more likely to smoke cigarettes and use marijuana, to experience stressful circumstances, and to be aggressive and hostile more than 20 years later.

Men who were bullied as children, on the other hand, tended to have more financial difficulties, felt more unfairly treated by others, and were less optimistic about their future two decades later.

The outcomes are especially critical because they put the men at higher risk for poor health, including serious cardiovascular issues, later in life, according to the researchers.

“The long-term effects of bullying involvement are important to establish,” Matthews said. “Most research on bullying is based on addressing mental health outcomes, but we wished to examine the potential impact of involvement in bullying on physical health and psychosocial risk factors for poor physical health.”

Previous research has linked psychosocial risk factors like stress, anger, and hostility to increased risks of health problems, such as heart attacks, stroke, and high blood pressure. Because bullying leads to stressful interpersonal interactions for both the perpetrators and targets, the researchers hypothesized that both bullies and bullying victims might be at higher risk of negative health outcomes related to stress.

For the study, the researchers recruited participants from the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a longitudinal study of 500 boys enrolled in Pittsburgh public schools in 1987 and 1988, when the boys were in the first grade. More than half of the boys in the original study were Black and nearly 60 percent of the boys’ families received public financial assistance, such as food stamps.

Along with regular assessments on psychosocial, behavioral, and biological risk factors for poor health, researchers collected data from children, parents, and teachers on bullying behavior when the boys were 10 to 12 years old.

For the new study, Matthews and her research team successfully recruited more than 300 of the original study participants, who completed questionnaires on psychosocial health factors, such as stress levels, health history, diet and exercise, and socioeconomic status. Around 260 of the men came into the lab for blood draws, cardiovascular and inflammation assessments, and height and weight measurements.

Unexpectedly, neither bullying nor being bullied in childhood was related to inflammation or metabolic syndrome in adulthood, according to the researchers.

However, both childhood bullies and bullying victims had increased psychosocial risk factors for poor physical health, the study found.

The boys who engaged in more bullying in childhood tended to be more aggressive and were more likely to smoke in adulthood, risk factors for cardiovascular disease and other life-threatening diseases.

The boys with higher scores for being bullied tended to have lower incomes, more financial difficulties, and more stressful life experiences. They also perceived more unfair treatment relative to their peers. These outcomes are also related to risk for cardiovascular disease, the researchers noted.

“The childhood bullies were still aggressive as adults and victims of bullies were still feeling like they were treated unfairly as adults,” Matthews said. “Both groups had a lot of stress in their adult lives — so the impact of childhood bullying lasts a long time.”

The researchers speculate that both bullies and their victims may be at greater risk for poor physical health, including cardiovascular-disease events, over the long term. But they cautioned that many of the boys in the original study could not participate in the follow-up study because they were either deceased or incarcerated, which may have affected the results in unknown ways.

According to the researchers, their findings suggest that identifying children who are at risk for involvement in bullying and intervening early on may yield long-term psychosocial and physical health benefits that last into adulthood.​

Positive emotions such as contentment or satisfaction tell our brains to release positive chemicals such as serotonin or dopamine to make our bodies feel good.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.

When we find ourselves in a less-than-positive emotional state, this mental anguish can express itself throughout our bodies. For example, our brains release toxic levels of cortisol when we’re exposed to long-term physical, mental, or emotional stress. Our brain chemistry gets burnt-out and our bodies reflect this in physical ways.

The type of pain linked to high levels of cortisol or adrenal fatigue is easy for most people to identify, but emotional stress can express itself physically in many ways. For many people, chronic emotional stress just feels normal. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re in an unbalanced emotional state until we start examining our physical pain and attempt to determine its source.

Do you have chronic headaches or a kink in your back you just can’t seem to shake? Have you already tried everything medically available but the pain just won’t go away? You could be looking in the wrong places.

Many types of pain are directly linked to our emotions. Once we identify what’s causing the pain, we can start healing from the inside out.

What is Psychosomatic Pain?

Psychosomatic pain is a disorder characterized by chronic and physical symptoms with no apparent medical explanation. The term is derived from the word psyche referring to our mental state and soma which means body. Consider also that the word pain comes from the Latin word poena which means “penalty.” So psychosomatic pain is a specific type of physical pain triggered by our psychological state.

As the current of an emotion travels along our neural pathways, it triggers a release of chemical proteins called neuropeptides. Each emotion has its own individual frequency and, simultaneously, releases a corresponding receptor active peptide [1]. The late Dr. Candace B. Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion, wrote about how unprocessed emotions in the body actually become stuck, thereby affecting a person’s entire system.

Negative emotions and negative thoughts have a different energetic frequency than positive emotions and thoughts. Because of that, they can distort the organs, tissues, and cells that surround wherever they’re stored in the body.

Our bodies literally punish us for putting them through stressful emotional experiences. Unfortunately, negative emotions might not even be our own fault, but our bodies can’t tell the difference. Long-term emotional abuse or childhood neglect can manifest in chronic psychosomatic pain through no fault of our own.

Likewise, minor emotional inconveniences can also express themselves throughout our bodies in different forms of pain. The pain can last for years and even spread from one part of our body to another. We often won’t find a physical explanation or successful pharmaceutical treatment because there simply isn’t one.

It’s important to understand that the term “psychosomatic” doesn’t mean that pain or discomfort are ‘all in your head’, but rather that the symptoms result from brain function and chemistry.

Our minds and bodies work dualistically [2]. Mental pain can directly cause nerve damage and other physical pain. Fortunately, we can also harness our minds to relieve physical pain, as well.

If you’ve experienced physical maladies with no medical explanation in sight, it may be time to consider healing from the inside out through targeting and healing negative emotions and unprocessed emotional trauma.

7 Common Types of Pain That Are Directly Linked to Your Emotional State

1 – Headaches and Migraines

Most chronic headaches and migraines are triggered by the daily stresses of life. Generalized anxiety also causes headaches. Repressed (bottled-up) emotions surrounding stress — such as anxiety, worry, drama, and fatigue — can increase muscle tension, and dilated (widened) blood vessels can make a migraine worse.

An interesting trigger of the contemporary headache may be associated with the company we keep. For example, do you notice a tension headache when your abusive partner arrives home? Does your frontal headache show up around the time your narcissistic boss shows up to work?

If you’ve experienced headaches or have been medically diagnosed with migraines that weren’t part of your life before entering a toxic relationship or ongoing stressful situation, your emotions may be the root cause.

2 – Neck and Shoulder Pain

As stress starts to accumulate in our minds and bodies, the first place it typically manifests physically is in our shoulders and neck. Chronic neck and shoulder pain often arise from trying to carry the weight of the world on one’s shoulders, an inability to let go of a person or situation, or the inability to forgive.

3 – Back Pain

The emotional link to back pain depends on the area. The factors to consider are as varied as each person is, but the most salient include:

Physical stress to the lower backSedentary jobsLack of exerciseUntended psychological issuesDepression, anxietyCoping mechanisms, how you deal with stressBefore agreeing to invasive measures to treat your back pain, try psychological therapy and alternative healing modalities to see if they help.

4 – Abdominal Pain

Emotional stress wreaks havoc [4] on our digestive system. Long-term depression, anxiety, or PTSD can cause irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic ulcers, and general discomfort. Many stomach disorders indicate a failure to “stomach” a person or a situation which you dread or cannot tolerate. It can also mean that it’s difficult for you to deal with a person or situation that contradicts your plans, habits, or lifestyle. This may cause you to inwardly criticize yourself, preventing you from letting go of the situation.

5 – Menstrual Pain

That time-of-the-month is always painful, sure. But if a woman’s menstrual cycles become overly painful or she develops chronic conditions, her emotions could be the real culprit.

As women, when we refuse to embrace the difficult or unpleasant emotions inside of us, when we deny the shadow sides of our personalities, or when we hold negative beliefs about ourselves as women, various menstrual problems may manifest and can even trigger or exasperate endometriosis [5] and uterine fibroids.

6 – Pain in the Extremities

Pain or stiffness in our hips might indicate fear of going forward in major decisions or feeling there’s nothing to move forward to. Are you trying to avoid moving on from a past experience or state? Knee pain, stiffness or inflexibility may reflect rigidity in your perception of the future. It occurs more often in those who are unable to bend to new ideas, such as the idea of a different life. Pain in our arms might represent the incapacity and inability to hold the experiences of life.

Counseling or Group TherapyOver long periods of time, negative emotions can start to feel “normal.” If you aren’t sure where to start, talking to a therapist can help identify some areas to improve. Support groups can also provide dynamic feedback in a safe environment.

Yoga and MeditationMany studies show that developing a yoga and meditation routine can reduce symptoms of anxiety or depression and help us move towards a more-balanced emotional state.

Communicating and Understanding Your EmotionsSometimes we repress our emotions which, over time, leads to psychosomatic pain. Developing better communication skills can help us express our emotions properly so they don’t create an unnecessary burden on our bodies. If you are in a situation or relationship where you aren’t able to express yourself or your emotions, it may be time to consider ways to detach so you can move forward into emotional and physical healing.

Our emotions are often directly linked to our physical ailments. By identifying and treating our negative mental state, we can properly heal our bodies from the inside out.

​In the context of healing and self-improvement, there is a popular term that’s often tossed around: hope. However, rarely do people—including experts—talk about it in depth or even define it in any objective or coherent way. In this article, we will do exactly that. We will look at what this term entails and how to make more sense of it.

Definitions

When people say hope, they usually mean two things. If you look at the definition, it says that hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen, or an optimistic attitude of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one’s life or the world at large.

So there are two important aspects of it. One, an expectation for something to happen. And two, wanting for something positive to happen.

That’s the popular definition of it. Now, what does it all mean in terms of healing and personal growth?

Optimistic hope

Let’s talk about the most popular concept first: having a positive attitude towards the process you are going through and the result you are wishing for.

Many say that it is important to have hope, to think optimistically, to believe that you will be okay, and that everything will be fine. It’s easy to see that this mindset can be beneficial. When we feel lost, confused, hurt, self-doubtful, hope helps us feel better. It helps us keep going. It helps us not give up.

However, what is not often discussed are the negative effects of these beliefs. Yes, it can comfort us when we are on the right path, but it isn’t a universal rule because not everyone is on the right path.

That’s the problem with “positive thinking,” “optimism,” and similar attitudes: not every story has a happy ending, and some paths are better than others. Doing whatever you feel like doing and “hoping for the best” is not necessarily helpful. In many cases, it’s quite the opposite since you are abandoning self-agency in the process and acting inefficiently or even self-destructively.

For example, there are many people who severely lack self-responsibility, so they live their life passively. They think that whatever is happening in their life is because of some outside forces, be it destiny, stars, universe, god(s), karma, etc. And so they live their life unconsciously and do whatever by justifying it as “life happening because of [insert an outside force here]” instead of seeing themselves as being responsible for that life and having control over how it is.

So for many people in many scenarios, the term hope simply means I want this to happen but it is not necessarily tied to my personal agency and factual reality, or I want it but I don’t want to do what’s necessary to achieve it, so I’ll just hope for it.

In psychology, this is sometimes called wishful thinking or magical thinking or even delusion. It can help us feel good, but as you may have already figured out, the fact that you feel good doesn’t necessarily mean that things are okay.

Hoping for the best is not enough to get better, and it doesn’t necessarily result in actually getting better. It’s just something you would like to happen, which actually may or may not happen, depending on numerous factors and variables.

Realistic hope and pessimism

The other aspect of hope is expectation. It is not just a blind wish, but rather an estimation or a prediction based on your interpretation of reality. Having realistic expectations is much more important that having “good feelings.” So if you are overly positive about your progress or prognosis, you will only fall harder when it doesn’t go the way you “hoped” for.

However, a lot of people often stumble into a mindset that’s opposite to optimism: pessimism.

Here, a person might say, “It’s not going to work because of this, this, and this.” Or, “What’s the point of me trying so hard and still not getting where I want to be.”

While sometimes it’s objectively true, oftentimes a person simply thinks they are being realistic but they are simply being pessimistic and using it as an excuse to quit or not to try harder. Here, they also abandon self-agency.

What’s the best attitude then?

If we understand hope as two main elements that are positivity and realistic expectation, then we can summarize it with the following spectrum.

Pessimism <–> Realism <–> Optimism

In my opinion, the healthiest mindset is to understand what you’re going through, to have a direction, to focus on your process, to periodically check on your progress, and do so in a positively-realistic manner. A good example of that is framing your situation positively yet realistically.

For instance, you could tell yourself that you will succeed no matter what (optimism). But how do you know that? Since it’s not verifiable, you don’t really believe it and may feel even worse because you are trying to convince yourself of something that isn’t verifiable and therefore highly doubtful.

The same situation occurs if you tell yourself that you will fail and there is no point of even trying (pessimism). You don’t know that. But just by trying, your chance of success—whatever it means to you here—is at least above zero percent. If you don’t even try, unless something random or out of your control happens, the chance of success is factually zero.

In contrast, you might tell yourself, “You are not alone struggling with this,” which is verifiable and true. This statement will give you a perspective that you are not alone in this world with your problems, which often alleviates anxiety. Or, “I am not where I want to be, but so far I have achieved this, and that seems to be working for me,” which is also true and empowering.

So, instead of deluding yourself with “positive thoughts” or feeling stuck in a helpless and passive state, recognize your self-responsibility in a realistic way and look for realistic solutions.

The truth is that not everyone achieves what they want to achieve. At the same time, all of us have our own problems. A lot of those problems are similar among us. There are various solutions for those problems. Some of them are more known than others. Some of them work better than others. Nobody can tell you what approach to take because you have to make your own choices.

However, a lot of people are able overcome many of their problems, or at least make them bearable. Indeed, even the problems that you probably have and that sometimes appear unsolvable. It doesn’t mean that you will, too—but it means that there is realistic hope for it.